I’m (now hate) watching this British series about a time traveling ballerina. They did not spend any money on writers and less on choreography. In fact, I think they made the stunt dancers watch old episodes of that show about kids at Julliard and told them to dance like that. It’s inane and I can almost forgive that but I’m having a tough time forgiving a show about ballerinas with no attempt to get people with dance training in the roles.
All the dancers are terrible. The main character stands around with her feet pointing straight forward. Friends, a young ballerina has spent 15+ years perfecting her turn out. A ballerina standing around in class or rehearsal or with her dance buddies is going to stand in some degree of turn out and body alignment. You can tell when someone has serious dance training because of the way they walk and move and none of these actors move that way. Maybe one but she’s not the lead. Let’s talk about pointing toes. After years of intensive training, a classically trained dancer has insane toe point. None of these fools have that.
They did spend some time on arms, that is clear. And that is because all the shots of the actors “dancing” are from mid-chest up. All the shots of actual dancing are from the mid-chest down, shot from behind, or shot from far away. That’s right. All the actual ballerinas in this are headless.
Shot of almost graceful arms and a wistfully smiling face …. jump cut to headless ballerina doing actual ballerina stuff. Then there’s stupid stuff like the lead character is standing like a lump wearing ballet flats. (And by the way, NOBODY ever has scuffed or worn shoes.) Someone says “Your turn” and the next thing we see is a headless ballerina in pointe shoes.
Also, every dancer wears the exact same thing all the time when “dancing” probably because they had the real ballerinas come in for an afternoon and do actual dancing so the editors could slap in some headless dancer footage later. One time an instructor told someone to do an arabesque. Cut to a shot of half a pirouette.
The lead male actor has skinny legs. If he exercises in real life, it’s not very hard and he doesn’t go anywhere near weights. So imagine the hilarity when he’s moving his upper torso pretending he’s a dancer and then they cut to a shot of a real dancer whose body is lean and muscled. I laughed so hard the first time I saw that so that was a bonus. Ballet is a difficult, demanding sport and even before the professional level bodies are transformed with lean, controlled muscle.
This time traveling ballerina has come to the future from 1905 and my first thought was, this soft bodied woman is going to struggle to keep up with modern dancers. Silly me. No one is actually dancing so there’s no struggle and so far there are no scenes of actual dance class, just the bits before, in between, and after.
So mostly the dance goes like this: Shots of “dancers” from shoulders up moving arms and maybe a transition step with wretchedly pointed feet and then all the people watching this go “Wow. She’s really good.”
No. No she isn’t
Anyway, it’s kind of a fun hate watch.